Humanitarian protestors shown behind United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken as he provides testimony to congress in an appeal to send billions of dollars to Israel in US military support. The testimony occurred while the Israeli government continues to engage in genocide towards the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Nov 1st 2023

American Zionism, as a social phenomenon, is wholly unconcerned with the safety of Jews.

One could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. On the surface, such impassioned appeals for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East would reasonably appear to be about the safety of Jewish people. However, in American culture, these appeals are almost always the product of a cynical attempt by people with power to wield the concept as a crude, but rhetorically effective, means of labeling those they disagree with as “antisemitic”.

In this way Zionism has become a highly-euphemized form of many different, and often conflicting, political agendas that are unrelated to combating antisemitism or the well-being of Jewish people. 

In the modern era, Zionism is an idea so singularly righteous, so inextricably tied to the pivotal global trauma of the Holocaust, as to be a uniquely effective political bludgeon for nearly any purpose or ideology. This is how, for example, we can see openly antisemitic, white-nationalist groups also passionately advocating for a sovereign Jewish state. Even an ideology like white supremacy, which is seemingly incompatible with an international directive to protect Jews from persecution (millions of Jews are not white), is able to leverage Zionism to great effect.

Conveniently for those doing the rhetorical bludgeoning and/or virtue signaling, Zionism, also fits nicely into a powerful pre-existing cultural template, based on centuries of colonialism, that Americans and their politicians are unconsciously primed to support. Americans have a long history of diminishing the humanity of Arab peoples and a much longer, and no less bloody, history of diminishing the humanity of the native people who lived in present day America prior to colonization. Israel, as a direct product of the same lineage of western colonialism, fits nicely into the preexisting hegemonic framework that preferences the experiences of the settler over the displaced.

For these reasons, Zionism would appear to run American politics at every level. To the cynical, it predictably rouses righteous indignation from the masses to the benefit of the person wielding it. While Zionist arguments claim to be in favor of a Jewish ethnostate on the surface (a problematic, though widely supported, concept in its own right), these “arguments” also have the remarkable ability to remain nearly entirely ideologically meaningless. This makes Zionist arguments both highly effective in rousing support and/or condemnation, while remaining very low-risk politically. Notably, these exact characteristics also make these pro-Zionist arguments highly destructive to the process of responsible governance and national discourse.

Zionism in American culture, in broadest sense, is neither a coherent ideology nor is it an organized movement. It is, however, a remarkably effective multi-purpose rhetorical tool. For this reason, Zionism has remained popular in American political discourse for decades. In American politics, it is both everything and nothing.

Mostly though, Zionism, as it exists in American culture today, is a deadly testament to society’s willingness to allow itself to uncritically consume the cheap, unrefined righteous indignation that is dolled out by various powerful parties as rhetorical leverage in the pursuit of other political goals, goals that are either opaque by design or, perhaps, simply less socially compelling. 

Importantly, the political agendas that are frequently hitched to pro-Zionist arguments are almost always unrelated to the well-being of Jewish people. In fact, these goals are sometimes directly at odds with the well-being of Jews. Such a case is on display now as the world watches Israel’s genocide of Palestinian civilians play out on global stage, in horrific fashion. 

Many, perhaps the majority, of global witnesses already know the obvious: Israel’s choice to slaughter Palestinian people as collective punishment, a truly barbaric war crime, will not make Jewish people safer. 

To the contrary, Israel has placed a target on all Jewish people by pushing propaganda that attributes Israeli slaughter of ordinary Palestinian people (violence that 800 top international experts and historians on the Holocaust, international law, and genocide, have identified, in a signed open letter, as having all the key characteristics of genocide) to the wishes of all Jews.

Like most American politicians, the Israeli government is engaged in its own attempt to leverage the existence of antisemitism, through pro-Zionist arguments, towards ends unrelated to the well-being of Jewish people. Horrific as it is, it also makes sense that most American politicians were already primed to voice support for Israel as it engages in heinous, brutal war crimes: both the Israeli government and American politicians regularly and frequently pay homage to the same destructive rhetorical tool. These parties wield the rhetorical tool of Zionism in an effort to cynically leverage the trauma of the Holocaust towards their own ends. 

Unfortunately, due to profound inter-generational trauma, as a product of the Holocaust, dishonest Zionist arguments remain effective with some American Jews despite this obvious incongruence. To see Jewish people passionately supporting the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is both heartbreaking and understandable. It is the tragic story of an unhealed inter-generational trauma cycle: some of the people who are most affected by the Holocaust, in their human desire to feel safe from the worst forms of ethnic persecution, are now among the most openly genocidal voices in the world. Or, put another way, both American politicians and the government of Israel are disingenuously leveraging the inter-generational trauma of Jewish people against them, to use for their own means. 

It is through this lens that we can begin to understand the tragic madness on display in the world now, as well as the complicity of the United States in that tragedy, despite having near-unilateral power to change the outcome. In a world already saturated with antisemitism, Israel engages in unrestrained, genocidal killing of Palestinians in the name of all Jewish people. With the enthusiastic support of most elected officials in the United States, Israel makes Jews around the world a target for violence as well as understandable, though misplaced, anger at the war atrocities it is committing every day. This should be unacceptable to anyone who values the safety of Jewish people, Jewish communities, and Palestinians alike.